Imagine a city. The one you want to live in. It can be by the sea or at the foot of a mountain. Sprawled wide or needling the clouds with skyscrapers. But there’s one thing a good city always is. Scaled.
Let me clarify. For city to remain a city it needs to stay consistent. A tree grows every branch with everything it needs, bark for protection and leaves for catching the sun. The same way a city should expand with all its purposes in mind. Connecting people, creating communities, nurturing culture, weaving a fabric for comfortable life.
So should the companies. Expanding means making sure that each function is ready to perform on a larger scale. Sales have capacity to deal with increased influx of customers. Product can manage the flow of feature requests. Recruiters are ready to hunt for talent to support the growth. The list goes on and on.
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant.
Before the public transportation, life was concentrated locally. With free time scarce the necessary places had to be within walkable distance. Living in close quarters meant a strong sense of community: mutual support and more safety, also for the kids. Work didn’t end at six, blending seamlessly with private life, which had very little of private to be fair.
To some extent, this concept is repeated now. The 15-minute city concept proposes to plan cities in areas of 15-minute walk radius. Each has everything needed for comfortable living, from grocery stores and coffee shops to schools and clinics. They’re linked by public transportation that also takes the inhabitants to the city centre for more social life.
When the city grows, it adds more urban bubbles like these to its territory. A fractal-like structure on its own. Similar to a business entering new markets. The division there does have strong connections to mothership but first and foremost is a self-sufficient unit. Same when the company expands its offering and forms sub-divisions and cross-functional teams to cater to new products. Laws of business are about people’s behaviour and not so much different from social ones.
All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.
When scaling goes out of control, however, the city becomes unbalanced. Take the sprawl. Such enormous single-purpose areas isolate people. They also are the black holes for time wasted on commute. And they’re bad for the climate.
A company would quickly loose its hard-gained competitive edge if it starts to sprawl. By hiring an army of sales people who promise features product and tech cannot support. By overhiring on the wave of underdeveloped strategy. By diluting its market and forgetting its mission. One part is thriving while others struggle to keep up. Business becomes unbalanced.
Also, improving radically by destroying the old completely should be well thought through. Similar to mediaeval cities, the self-organised female communities of Brazilian favelas suffered from seemingly beneficial action of resettling the inhabitants. Yes, they moved into better housing but lost the whole support network. Before, they could work from home and have their kids looked after by other community members. After, they found themselves removed from workplaces and childcare options.
Established practices are there for a reason. They might have appeared out of need rather than comfort sometimes but they help. Businesses are about people for people. A collective organism that is an organisation wouldn’t function properly when robbed of supporting mechanisms. Change should be implemented gradually and discussed in detail.
It wasn’t a city, it was a process
That’s what Terry Pratchett says in ‘Night Watch’.
Processes rule cities as they rule companies. Also lives. They create a cellular structure that helps complex systems scale. Good processes are replicable. They are ‘walkable’, maybe not in 15 minutes, but as they’re well-documented, visualised and clear to everyone, they can be learned quickly. They include all people and prevent sprawl.
Companies can strive to reinvent the wheel and succeed, but they cannot escape the laws of physics that makes it spin. What I’m saying here is that being ambitions in scaling needs proper support from all parts of your organisation.
Imagine a city where you die to live in. Then imagine a company which you’re living to build. What makes them both great is essentially the same. Balanced a diverse structure sewn together with processes and people.
“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”
― Christopher Morley
Photo by Oleksii Khodakivskiy on Unsplash
